Essays with John Cobb:
A Processual Personal God
by Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr.
May 1998
Is God Personal?
Publication Month: May 1998
Dr. Cobb’s Response
Editing of Content Structure by R.E. Slater
I.
The answer to this, as to so many questions is Yes and No, but on the whole Yes is a better answer than No. Of course, everything depends on what is meant by “personal”. For some people, the only way God can be personal is to be very much like a human being. In the extreme case this involves attributing a body to God that resembles a human body. Obviously, the answer must then be No. If we think of God having a body, that body is the universe as a whole.
More commonly, it is only the human mind or soul or spirit that God is understood to resemble. Then the answer depends on how the questioner understands the human spirit. Often it is understood substantialistically, with the relations among human spirits, and even between spirit and body, seen as quite external. When it is clear that the questioner is thinking in this way, it is still best to begin with the answer No. God is not like another human being, only greater, when one thinks of a human being in this way. But then, from a process perspective, other human beings are not like that either!
II.
In somewhat more sophisticated imagery, questioners sometimes are asking whether the I-Thou relationship exists between us and God. Addressing God as Thou has been so central to the Abrahamic traditions that to rule out such language would mean a serious rupture. Process theology allows and affirms its use.
But the language of I-Thou suggests an over-againstness or externality that is inadequate and misleading. In Tillich’s terminology it seems to imply that God is one being alongside other beings. We need to claim the language but free it from this externalistic interpretation. Paul himself helps us to do so. He says of human beings that we are members one of another and jointly members of the body of Christ. We are in Christ and Christ is in us. The Holy Spirit is also found within. Process thought interprets this to mean that we participate in constituting the very being of one another and that the divine reality participates in constituting our being as we participate in constituting the divine reality. We are quite literally in God, and God is quite literally in us.
I-Thou language by itself does not capture this. But this is not because the relationship process thinkers affirm is less personal. The mutual immanence of all things only makes the personal character of relationships deeper, more inextricable. Process thought in this way enables us to appreciate the meaning of some of the language of the New Testament that has previously been toned down because of the metaphysical assumptions of interpreters.
Even so, this emphasis on the immanence of God seems to some to count against the idea of God as a personal being. In human interpersonal relations, we transcend one another as well as participating in one another. Does God transcend us? Of course. But is the way that God transcends us similar to the way other human persons transcend us?
No, there are differences. Other people are spatially separated from us. The locus from which they experience the world is different from the one from which we experience the world. But God is equally everywhere. Where we are, God is there, too. Or else, God as transcending creatures is “nowhere” in the sense that spatial language may not apply to God. In this way God is very different from another human person.
III.
Nevertheless, God, like other human persons, is a subject who acts and is acted upon. In Whitehead’s terminology, God is an actual entity, distinct from all other actual entities. This does not make God any more like humans than like creatures in general. On the other hand, we suppose that some human characteristics, shared with some but by no means all other creatures, are shared by God. Consciousness is an important example.
As to how much further we should go in attributing human-like characteristics to God, process theologians divide. Charles Hartshorne encourages us to think of God as a closely unified succession of actual entities in which all the past ones are fully included in the present one. Since such a succession of actual entities is just what Whitehead defines as a “living person”, Hartshorne gives a clear positive answer to the question of whether God is a person. Whitehead, on the other hand, proposes that we think of God as a single everlasting actual entity. That is extremely different from any creature, including the human one. In his terminology, then, God is not a person. Yet much of what believers have in mind when they ask whether God is a person, is present in God for Whitehead as well.
* * * * * *
My Process Observations
on a Processual Personal God
by R.E. Slater
November 16, 2021
I.
Behind the subject of "Theology Proper" (e.g., the "Study of God") in systematic language comes process theology to add or take away important details. Classical language built on Platonism necessarily covers us what non-Platonic process language is speaking to.
In order, God is not a thing no more than we are. The divine soul, like the human soul - or even the "cosmic" soul - are (living and non-living) processes in motion with one another. In Platonic imagery God is a God-like entity and humans are our own kind of entity. Separate entities yet deeply connected as between Creator to Created or God, as the First Process, to creation (or us) as the successional orders of subtending processes.
Further, the divine/human emotion of love is not a thing but a resulting feeling between Creator to His creation, or between one person to another. Love is not a thing but a feeling. I believe neo-Platonism might circumscribe such secondary interactive processes as a kind of thing or substance as well (someone correct me on this if I've strayed too far). The point being, Platonism sees creation as a world of (external and secondary) objects even as it would see God as a divine object. Thus, in a literal bible, we read of God, angels, demons, humanity, heaven, hell, etc, in objectified ways rather than as interconnecting, if not metaphysical and ontological, (divine and creaturely organic) processes.
These first two paragraphs then get to what Dr. Cobb is referring to externalistic interpretation, that is, reading the bible Platonically rather than in its process sense. One leans on an older Greek philosophy, the latter on Alfred North Whitehead's more recent observations of the world we live in, known as process philosophy. Philosophy is a way for humans to explain the world around them. In the 21st Century, given the evolutionary and quantum sciences, we are beginning to see the world not in Newtonian terms of substances but in terms of processes.
Whitehead had observed this early on as he interacted with Hegel and other earlier ideas contemporary with his own (including much earlier non-Platonic Greek ideas of process speculation) as well as at Einstein's work both on a personal level as well as on an academic level (ahead of the idea of Niels Bohr's quantum mechanics by some 20+ years).
Process thinking was a relatively new way of looking at the classical cosmology and viewing it as a living, feeling, organic process highly interrelated between the whole to its parts and its parts to the whole. Whereas classical science had viewed creation as a clock-work mechanism reducible to its parts, contemporary (process) science was looking at the motion and movement of those process-driven EVENTS as forming the "cosmic organism" it was looking at more in terms of energy particles and quantum forces interacting with each other rather than in terms of external , "atomic" objects interacting with one another.
II.
Next, the I-thou relationship between God and creation or God and man takes on the more broader area of panentheism v classical theism. The former centers on the immanence or "nearness" of God with creation or mankind whereas the latter concentrates on the transcendence or "farness" of God away from creation or mankind.
One of the more discussed theological ideas on the topic of God's nearness with us can be found in the subject matter of open theology and relational theology. When I came to these subjects myself based upon my study of Arminian (Wesleyan, qua Methodist) theology over that of Calvinistic (Reformed) theology, I brought both ideas together without hesitation. Thus, Open AND Relational theology, as neither should stand alone without the other.
My reasoning stood along the lines that the future is unknown and therefore as open to us as it is to God. God does not know the future even as God is intimately (or immanently) involved in the future's future as both its image-maker as well as it's designer. What I've done is go over-and-beyond classical theism's imagery of God "directing" the future in a deterministic (or controlling way) to the imagery of God being "in" or "inside" the future which is unfolding in its own process way as given to it by its process Maker. Hence, the teleological edge of creation is imbued with God's own process Image which urges a freewill creation of forces, energies, and creational "souls" forward towards "becoming" in its being, and striving for its own "wellbeing" in its "becoming." Thus, the future is open because God is open in His Love and divine freewilled Soul. God IS the process (process theology qua Arminianism) more than just being its Determiner (Calvinism)
Secondly, relational theology speaks to the freewill "soul" of the cosmos, creation, and sentient creatures. God cannot "direct" or "control" or "determine" freewilled processes but God has IMBUED freewill processes to strive towards surviving, to living (or being), to becoming beyond what it is. There is this very mystical divine urge towards the struggle of becoming. It cannot be controlled but it is this (divine) urge which propels all energies, forces, and "souls" towards interactivity with one another is a processed way in finding wellbeing within its synthesis.
Thus, to speak of Open Theology and Relational Theology is to speak of both processes working together in an intimately (or better, immanently) panrelational, panexperiential - even panpsychic - kind of way. This then begins to describe the idea of an immanent world of God and creation in a divinely intimate process way of being and becoming together. It recognizes the "otherness" of God but states God's "otherness" has no meaning to us unless God is deeply - immanently - connected with us into the very fabric of our being as God is with all of the process-based order. Transcendence then becomes both an unnecessary idea as well as a very hollow, empty Platonic idea of classicism which can immediately be jettisoned from our bible-based theological categories.
III.
Here, Dr. Cobb wishes to further explain Whitehead in terms of process immanency. Let's leave this subject matter to another time. Just know the further you go into Whitehead, the further you will go into the obscuratus and arcane linguistic semantics of the process philosophical language (aka, Process & Reality). And to the degree I've read Whitehead and been involved in it's study with John Cobb is the degree that its finer detail makes process process.
Peace,
R.E. Slater
November 16, 2021
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